


Four Walls and a Couple Windows

by rickyisms



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, just some thoughts about making a place a home, whiskey is awkward and private
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:34:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23628535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rickyisms/pseuds/rickyisms
Summary: The bedroom sits empty for months_____just 3000 words about a bedroom
Relationships: Whiskey&Tango&Foxtrot
Comments: 6
Kudos: 65





	Four Walls and a Couple Windows

The bedroom sits empty over the summer. For three years, it was Eric Bittle’s. Over those years, things changed. The room saw Bitty cry, it saw him come barreling through the doors, frustration lining his face. The room had stood sturdy no matter how many times he shook the walls with his music, the door was solid no matter how many times Jack Zimmermann marched across the hall and demanded he turn it down. The bedroom had been quiet and private in moments of isolation and introspection, it had been loud and bright as other members of the team flowed in and out. It was filled with laughter and smiles, the walls lined with pennants and photographs. There was a puck balanced on top of the door frame, white tape wrapped around it with the words,  _ Eric Bittle, first NCAA goal,  _ written on the tape in sharpie. 

Eric Bittle had smiled as he left, closing the door behind him for the last time. He had cried in the room for (presumably) the last time, it was only fair that he give it one last teary eyed smile. The boxes had been moved down the stairs into the back of Jack’s pickup truck. 

The room had three years to get to know Bitty. It had been three years of flour covered jeans thrown at hampers, three years of remembering to lock the door at Haus parties. It had only been one year of cursing himself for falling in love with a straight boy, because for the next two years, the aforementioned boy had shared the room, slept secretly within its walls for one of them. 

Jack was leaning against the cab of his truck, he’d said his goodbyes two years ago. This place still meant something to him, but he knew how much more fresh it was for Bitty. 

Bitty had a cardboard box perched on his hip. His hand trailed over the rough wood of the porch rail as he walked down the stairs and onto the driveway. He turned around, glassy eyed and smiling, he looked up. 

The windows were open just a crack to keep the place aired out over the summer, Bitty could still hear his blinds clacking against the wooframe of the window. 

He cozied up against Jack’s side and looked up at the window. 

“I love you, Bits,” Jack kissed the top off Bitty’s head. 

“I love you too,”Bitty said without hesitation. 

He was still staring up at the window. 

So the room sat empty. If someone had been standing inside Bitty’s old room, they would have seen Bitty heave one final sigh before putting his box into the back of the truck. The sun shone over the empty room. For the first time in three years, it was blank. 

The room sits empty even as the Haus starts to fill. As Chowder returns and the crashing in room across the hall signals that Nursey and Dex have returned. Tango sleeps on a mattress on a floor in the attic, Ford promised she’d help him build his Ikea bed when she arrived a couple days into training camp. 

Slowly, the Haus comes back to life. The smell of baking bread once again fills the air, though it’s a different pair of hands that end up covered in flour. The sound of raucous laughter once again fills the air. The boys complain about sore muscles and training camp. And eventually Ford shows up and the sound of a drill is added to the growing chaotic warmth of the Haus. Everyone is surprised (but not actually that surprised) to learn that the showtunes that accompany the drill come from Tango’s side of the attic and not Ford’s. 

Even as training camp begins, though, the bedroom across the hall from Chowder’s remains empty. The door is closed, there’s a key somewhere, but no one bothers to find it. 

Whiskey has prospect camp in Philadelphia. His agent told his father that it was important to go to those kinds of things so that NHL GMs would remember his name when it came time to sign college free agents. Whiskey thinks winning an NCAA championship without his captain on the ice ought to be enough to do it, but his dad disagrees. So, Whiskey goes to Philadelphia. 

There was no reason for choosing Philadelphia. It’s just there, they’re good at development and they invited him. He doesn’t have any plans to sign with them, not any time in the immediate future anyway. After a summer of Arizona heat, Philly feels almost cold. He stays in a hotel with a kid from Northwestern. He’s quiet, goes out most nights while Whiskey stays in, but they get along fine. He knows that he’ll miss the first two games of Samwell’s pre-season, but he’s cleared it with Murray and Hall. They want him to make the NHL almost as much as his dad and his agent do, it’s good for the program. Sometimes he wonders if the team will resent that. He always shakes that thought out of his mind, hunches his shoulders and pulls the sheet over his body. 

Whiskey is not a sentimental young man. He doesn’t think much about the past, he doesn’t think much about the future. Things happen and then they end and there’s nothing he can do about it so he just keeps going. He wins an NCAA championship, he celebrates, he goes home, he sees his family, his old friends, his girlfriend who he’s still not quite sure is his girlfriend anymore, he goes to prospect camp, and then he gets on a Greyhound to Samwell. 

His mother ships his clothes and his furniture to the Haus. He expects to find the shipping containers in the driveway when he arrives, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. But someone’s moved his things up to his bedroom. He sees the containers sitting in the middle of the bedroom when he opens the door. The window is still open a crack. The first thing Whiskey does is open it all the way. He sees the boxes in the middle of his room, Bitty’s old bed frame is in the corner. 

The walls are empty and the afternoon sun is pouring in through the open window. 

The Haus is quiet, the team left about an hour ago for a game at Harvard. Whiskey’s alone. So he lets the silence envelope him. He sits on the floor, duffel bag in front of him. This is only the second time he’s ever stepped foot in this room. He can count the number of times he’s hung out in the Haus on two hands. He cuts the plastic off of the mattress that he had shipped to the Haus, throws it onto the bed frame to unravel. 

By the time he’s done unpacking, his clothes are in the closet and the dresser. He’s put his dark blue sheets on the bed. That’s it. 

Whiskey goes to bed before the team gets back from Harvard. 

He wakes up the next morning because someone drops a dish in the kitchen. 

“Oh Mother _ fucker! _ ” He hears Nursey’s voice carrying up the stairs, “Shit bro, let me get you a bad-aid.”

“Nurse!” Dex’s voice shouts, “I’m fucking fine!”

He hears heavy footsteps coming down the attic stairs. 

“The first aid kit is under the sink?” Ford’s voice comes next. 

“Is anybody bleeding?” he hears Chowder’s door open. 

“Yo! Did someone drop something?” That’s Tango now. 

They all bound down the stairs and moments later, Whiskey hears laughter. He stands up and rubs his eyes. It’s a Saturday morning and he can smell something baking. Strawberry or raspberry, but definitely fruit. He pulls on a pair of sweatpants and reaches for his doorknob. And then he pauses. His hand falls to his side and he takes a step back. He hears another round of laughter and sits back down on his bed. 

Whiskey doesn’t want to ruin whatever they're laughing about. And he doesn’t want them to see him a few minutes after he woke up. He pulls on a pair of khakis and a polo shirt and sits down in the desk that Bitty left for him. He puts his laptop on the empty wooden surface and turns it on. He checks his school e-mail and answers a text from his Dad about prospect camp and he tries to be as quiet as possible in his room. 

The room has a new occupant, but something about it still feels empty. The new boy is different from the old one. He hangs nothing on the walls, he doesn’t prop his door open a crack so that people can chat as they walk past. His brows are always furrowed, even when he’s alone. He cracks open the window, not because he likes the fresh air, but because he feels like he should. 

When he finally leaves his room, he does so slowly, he creeps down the stairs. Hoping not to be noticed. Whiskey sees Chowder sitting on the floor in a perfect split, a textbook in front of him. 

“Woah, Whiskey!” Chowder says, “I didn’t even know you were here.”

“Oh, uh,” Whiskey says, “Yeah, I got here yesterday.”

“Dude, why didn’t you say hi?” Tango comes bounding out of the kitchen. 

Whiskey’s shoulder’s don’t relax but he does uncross his arms and lets Tango pull him in for a hug. 

“Hey, Tony,” Whiskey mutters. 

“Seriously, how long were you here for?”

“Since a couple hours after you guys left.”

“Did you get your room set up?” Tango asks. 

“Uh,” Whiskey starts, “Wasn’t a lot to set up, honestly.”

“Like not even pictures or anything?”

“Ha,” Whiskey says, “I don’t take many pictures.”

“Oh,” Tango says, “Do you want to come see the attic? I think we’re pretty much set up,” he continues. 

“Yeah,” Whiskey says, “Sure.”

Tango bounds up the stairs, with a wide and open grin on his face. Whiskey follows, his half smile is a little less open. 

“Guess who’s here!” Tango shouts, flinging open the door to the attic. He waltzes in, Ford’s sitting on her twin sized bed, one earbud in, one hanging around her neck. Whiskey stands in the doorway and gives her a small wave. 

“Whiskey!” She says. 

The attic windows are smaller than the one in Whiskey’s room, but it’s brighter up here, he can’t figure out why until he looks up and sees strands of fairy lights strung across the ceiling. 

“Aren’t they cool?” Tango says. 

Ford’s bed is on one side of the room, underneath the window. Tango’s is on the opposite side. Ford has playbills hanging above her bed. They’re desks are pressed against the walls, on opposite sides of the room. Tango’s is already kind of a mess, but in the organized and chaotic way that Whiskey’s come to expect from him. Ford has already set up her colour coded white board calendar. 

“You can come in,” Ford jerks her head for him to take a few steps in. 

Whiskey does, hands still resting firmly in his pockets. 

“How was camp?” Tango asks. 

“Good,” Whiskey answered. 

“Did you meet any of the players.”

“No.”

“Oh. So it was just other college kids.”

“And overagers from juniors.”

“Was it fun?”

“Tango, don’t interrogate the man,” Ford scolds. 

“It was fine.”

Whiskey’s trying hard not to feel like he’s invading someone’s space. He’s looking down at his shoes. He looks up, briefly. Ford has a few pieces of twine strung over her bed, she has polaroids from last year hanging off of it with clothespins. 

The attic has always been shared by a pair. Ransom and Holster, then Ollie and Wicks, now Tango and Foxtrot. It’s always had a blend of the energy of the two people who lived in it. Tango and Ford are no exception. When WTF had first started hanging out, Ford had been worried that she wouldn’t have the same relationship with them as they did with each other. But now Whiskey knows that that’s not true, if anything, it’s Tango and Ford who do most of the scheming and laughing with each other. More often than not, Whiskey just feels like he’s there. 

He leans against Ford’s desk. He picks up a picture frame and turns it over in his hand. It’s a picture of them in their first year, posing with Wellie the well, Whiskey notices his own half smile beside Tango and Ford’s grinning faces. 

“That was a fun day,” Ford says, she’s standing behind him now. 

“Yeah,” Whiskey mutters. 

It’s two days later and Whiskey’s in his room after his first pre-season game. He’s on a line with a frog and Tango. He played fine, but he still wants the chance to watch his game back on his laptop. He sits at his desk with a pen and a pad of legal paper jotting down what he sees. He hears the front door of the Haus, he hears Bully and Hops’ voices. 

“Yo! We brought pizza!” Hops yells loud enough that Tango and Ford jog down the stairs. 

Ford knocks on his door, easing it open just a crack, “You coming?” She asks. 

“Yeah, just give me a minute,” Whiskey turns around.

“Okay,” she smiles at him. He catches a flicker of what he interprets as pity. It’s really concern as she looks at the walls. 

The room still doesn’t feel like a home. The new owner doesn’t hang up posters or pennants. He has no pucks balanced above the doorframe. 

Ford ducks her head out of the room. Moments later, Whiskey hears music floating up the stairs. A sure sign that Louis has arrived. 

He hears laughter, and eventually he smells something baking. 

Whiskey finishes watching the tape, he looks down at his notepad. Hears Dex’s laugh, the high pitched squeal of Ford and he wonders if he should join them. He looks at the clock. It’s been an hour since Ford knocked on his door and they sound like they’re all having fun and Whiskey doesn’t want to ruin that. Sometimes when he walks into a conversation, it falls silent. He’s not quite sure what to say. 

He can talk to Tango and Ford just fine. But the entire team is a lot. 

He rewinds the video and starts jotting down more notes. 

When he opens the door to take a shower, he finds a paper plate sitting in front of his door. There’s a slice of pizza and an oatmeal cookie on it. 

As the Haus fills with laughter, and gets warm, Whiskey’s room remains cold and impersonal. He comes home after the last exhibition game. He walked home with Tango an Ford, but they’d retreated to the attic, sensing Whiskey’s pathological need to be alone after a loss. Whiskey had had a breakaway in the third that would have tied the game, but he whiffed it. 

He can’t make himself watch the game tape, instead he just picks up his pad of legal paper and jots down two words,  _ Be Better.  _

He changes out of one SMH hoodie and into another and in a moment of impulse, throws open the window and climbs out onto the roof. He sits with his legs tucked into his chest. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be feeling. He doesn’t feel lost or sad, just  _ there, _ like none of it’s quite his yet. 

He hears the attic window open, Tango’s head sticks out. 

“Yo, are you on the roof, dude?” Tango asks. 

“Yes,” Whiskey says. 

Tango asks dumb questions, but Whiskey always answers them. 

“‘Swawesome,” Tango says, and the his heads gone. 

The hallway window opens and Tango climbs out next to him. 

“Don’t tell me your cut up about an exhibition loss.”

“Okay, I won’t tell you.”

“Bro,” Tango says, “You alright?”

“I just feel weird,” Whiskey mutters. 

“About?”

“Dunno.”

“Are you homesick. Because I know you did dorms for the past two years but it’s different moving into the Haus. Foxy woke up asking where we were for the first week she was here.”

Whiskey sighs, “I’m not homesick,” for that to be true he would have had to have at one point felt at home, “I dunno. I’m just… it’s weird living with other people… who like… care about me and want me to do stuff.”

“Do you want us to stop asking you to do stuff?”

“I don’t think so,” Whiskey says, “I just,” he clenches his fist, “it’s not like I don’t want to come down and chill. I just don’t. It’s weird. I feel like I’ll ruin your time. “

Tango shakes his head. 

“I know,” Whiskey says. 

“Bro, you make yourself lonely when you don’t need to be,” he puts his hand on Whiskey’s shoulder. 

Tango, for all his dumb questions, has always known how to pick Whiskey apart in the right kind of way at the right moment. 

“Also, your room is sad as fuck,” Tango says. 

“Oh,” Whiskey says, “I mean, I don’t really decorate much. Just four walls and a couple windows”

"Con, man, bud. You gotta spend all your time in there."

"I don't really notice much."

“That’s dumb,” Tango says, “Foxy’s bringing chineese home for dinner. We’re gonna eat in your room and figure out how to make it look less like a prison cell.”

So Whiskey eats rice sitting on the hardwood, trying to figure out how not to cross his arms quite so much. Ford brings down her coloured printer and they go through his phone gallery finding pictures that he likes. They frame the same picture that he’d seen earlier on Ford’s desk and set it on his night table. Tango digs through his closet and finds a Samwell pennant and sticks it above his door with command strips. 

“Dude you should hang this up,” he unfolds a signed poster of the 2011 Arizona Coyotes. 

“It’s kind of lame,” Whiskey says. 

“Dude, it’s cool,” Tango says and tapes it to the back of his door. 

“Who’s this?” Tango holds up a photobooth strip. Whiskey’s girlfriend is kissing his cheek. 

“My girlfriend,” Whiskey says, “Kind of.”

“What’s that mean?” Ford says, suddenly wary. 

“We get back together every other month,” Whiskey shrugs.

“Hmm,” Tango says, and pins it to his dresser. 

The next day when Whiskey’s watching some tape from a Yale game the year before, Ford comes into his room and flops down on his bed. She doesn’t say anything, just opens her book and starts reading. 

Tango starts climbing out the hall window onto the roof and into Whiskey’s room, just to hang out. 

And Whiskey loves it. They just show up, without him having to ask. Sometimes Dex brings a muffin or a slice of pie to his desk, Nursey stops by to lean against the doorframe and say “hey.”

Chowder sits in the hallway watching a baseball game on his laptop and Whiskey doesn’t feel like he’s bothering him when he sits in the doorframe with his legs kicked out in front of him and asks what the score is. 

And slowly, he starts to come downstairs when he hears laughter. His arms are still crossed and his brows are still furrowed, but he leans against the wall, half a smile on his face and watches, and that feels enough like participation for now. 

Slowly, the room stops being empty. All traces of Bitty had been wiped away months earlier, but now, traces of Whiskey are starting to appear. A framed photo of him and his dad. A collection of ticket stubs from NHL games he’d been to. A street sign that Tango had stolen last time they were drunk because he thought it said “Whisk street” but it actually said “Wisteria street” 

Whiskey thinks it’s funny to keep anyway. 

The new boy in the room still sits with hunched shoulders and furrows his brows. And sometimes he stays by himself for hours at a time, but the chaos of the house finds its way insde the walls. The door swings open easily for his friends, the window opens more smoothly every time Tango forces it open from the outside. His footsteps don’t fall as softly anymore, he doesn’t jump when he steps on a creaky floorboard. And once a week, the boy and the girl from the attic come downstairs with plates full of food and they sit on his floor and they laugh and they smile and they complain about sore muscles and heavy course loads. Their affection for one another fills the room more than any objects ever could. 


End file.
